Working at the Tote you have to balance your till at the end of each day, so far at Ascot I’ve done quite well. On the first day I was 5p over because one man didn’t take all his payout. Yesterday I actually balanced correctly, and today I was £5 over. So overall I’m not doing badly so far (watch now I’ve jinxed it I’ll be miles out tomorrow).

Josh has been staying over because it’s easier to get to Ascot from Balham than Dunstable (where he lives). We’ve been having banter and went to The Bedford for some live music yesterday with James. Really liked the sound of a guy called David Place, so we bought his album; check out his MySpace page.

Second post in an ongoing mini-series about my first ever job as a Tote betting assistant.

I love working with Tote. Essentially the job is merely regurgitating what people tell you into a till, but because of the wide variety of customers and the nature of the job, it can be as interesting as you make it. A lot of people ask for information ranging from “what is tote?” to “what are the odds on this horse in the next race?” to “what is a reverse forecast?”. Here’s your guide to Tote people-spotting:

The seasoned pro’s. These are the one’s that place what tote like to call the “exotic bets”, maybe picking 1st, 2nd and 3rd in a race, for example. They tend to study the screens and/or a newspaper for a long time, then (usually about 10 seconds before the race starts) place a really complicated bets with many permutations, which you then have to process before betting closes for that race.

The lads. Essentially the wannabe seasoned pro’s who’ll have competitions between themselves as to who can win the most money. These people usually place stupid combinations of bets, such as 5 win bets. I don’t know about you but I’ve never seen five horses collectively win a race.

The ladies. Can be noticed from their attire (usually understated dress and overstated hat) and because their husband will had over a £20 note to her before she approaches. She will then place a simple win or each way bet giving the horse name instead of its number.

The groupie. A group of girls who can barely walk through combination of ridiculous footwear and alcohol consumption. They will need an explanation of what “pool betting” is and a tip of horse to pick for the race. The latter is best resolved by handing over the race card and instigating a choice based on jockey colours (usually resulting in the pinkest, gayest jockey colours being picked).

The take home rule of betting is: the house always wins. And never was there a better example than on Saturday when I cashed out over £2,500 profit at my till alone.

I’m working for Tote this week on Friday and Saturday at Sandown Racecourse and I’m really looking forward to it. More excitingly though, it’s only a week until Royal Ascot!

This post is the first in a mini-series on my first ever job, at the Tote…

Sometime shortly after returning to university after Easter while me and Josh were revising, Josh heard about a company offering jobs to students for a week over the summer with a possibility of future work. That company was called the Tote.

For those who don’t know, the Tote is a pool betting organisation owned by the government. They take bets at racecourses for every horserace in the county, every day of the year. Instead of a traditional bookmaker offering odds on a horse to win, the Tote put all the stakes into a ‘pool’, which is then divided out amongst the winners. If you don’t understand it yet, then I’m gonna give up…

Anyway, so both me and Josh applied for a job and were invited to a training day at Ascot racecourse. The date was set for the 28th, which was the Thursday of the last week. Since this was after our exams we both accepted.

On the morning of the training day I woke up to a phone call from Josh:

Josh: “Have you got your photograph?”

Me: “What?”

Josh: “It said in the email that we need a passport-sized photograph”

“What email?”

As you can tell I hadn’t been told anything about the training day, but Josh had. Basically I needed several things:

Photocopy of passport (luckily Josh had a scanner so that was done very easily)

Packed lunch (ah, with my food resources being overdrawn, this one could be tricky)

Passport-sized photograph (nope, not a single one)

After panicking a little I came up with a plan. We went to the train station and took passport photos in the photo booth, bought a sandwich from the WH Smiths at the station, and got Josh to print off an extra form for me to fill out on the train journey there.

We got there on time and were given an introduction to Tote and how they operate. In the afternoon we we’re taught how to use the Tote Betting Machines to take all types of bets. This would have been fine had my machine not broken about 2 minutes in. But they quickly put me on another machine and I was away.

The second part of training is to attend a live race day and be shadowed by another member of staff. Me and Josh choose Sandown racecourse on the 4th July.

Despite the lack of any proof that we were employed by Tote we managed to get onto the racecourse and were assigned to staff members. I was with Ken in the imperial suite, which is a private function room that had been hired out by a group of 40 or so people who we would place bets for. It was great fun, Ken let me operate the till while he handled the money, and by the end of the meet I was getting pretty quick at taking bets.

It was quite funny when the first customer came up and asked me how long I’d been working for the Tote, to which I had to reply “Well, your my first customer.”

After successfully balancing at the end of the day, I felt quite chuffed. It was very diverse to take all the various bets and give information and advice as well.

I was then offered a job working the Derby on Friday and Saturday, to which I could hardly refuse.

So that brings us up to date. Today was my first day at the Derby, working on my own and taking bets. It was a really interesting day with a whole range of people taking bets. One guy won £483.50 from a £5 bet, not bad by my standards. He now goes down as the highest payout I’ve had to give, and the most number of sales in one day was 264, 65 up on Thursday when I took 199 bets. Tomorrow is supposed to be very, very busy, so wish me luck (get it)!

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Another full marathon week of training, but this time the long run was in Bath! I ran through the longest cycling tunnel in Britain – the Combe Down Tunnel – a 1 mile long tunnel on the now-closed Somerset and Dorset Joint Railway line.

Good news from the physio! Apparently the problems with my knee have been caused by a tight IT band on my left leg. There’s no damage to my knee, and with a bit of stretching to that area it should be fine!

So with that good news I set about a full week of marathon training, including a 10km lunch run, an interval session, and my longest run so far: a 33km jaunt along the canal.

I also finally get serious about nutrition for my long run. Turns out you can’t just run a marathon without eating anything during the race, so I need to think about how I’m going to get about 400-500 calories during the race and practice that in my long runs from now on.